Miscellaneous

I have been experimenting with various ways to use PowerPoint. Projeqt looks promising, though you cannot use PowerPoint slides with media and you will lose hyperlinks. It’s free take it for a trial run! Embedded sample can be found below:

Check out this wonderful BETA PowToon app while it is still free! Create a presentation featuring your own content and selected content. I found it easy to use, though I am still tweaking my timing! You’ll see what I mean when you check out my first presentation below!

I have been on a quest today. It has been quite an online journey! My quest began when a reader emailed me to tell me she could not post a PowerPoint using Issuu (see my post: Is you ready to use Issuu in your school?). If you read my original post about Issuu I did express some concerns about using the product in a K-12 environment because all embedded documents link back to a site that includes social elements (and some of the material on the link back site might not be appropriate for younger students).

After hearing that strong>Issuu was indeed blocked in the K-12 environment, I determined that what I needed to find was a site that allowed you to upload and embed documents (in this case PowerPoint) without a link back to the conversion site. I thought that surely there must be a way to accomplish this fairly simple task. After all, I found Fliggo…a terrific site where I can post videos without a link back to YouTube (see my Flipping Out for Fliggo! post). Surely, there must be a similar site for PowerPoint and other documents…right? Wrong.

I subscribed to and worked with several Web 2.0 tools that included upload and embed options. Most of the sites were terrific sites and would have been appropriate for any college professor who wanted to post a presentation on a class site or blog. Unfortunately, every site I explored had a “link back” that I could not get past. I checked all account options, reviewed coding, in short….I tried a lot of different techniques to block or delete the link back functions found on these sites. I came close a couple of times, but still did not find a site I felt comfortable recommending for the K-12 environement.

So folks, I am recommending a work-around option that I do feel is safe in the K-12 environment…it’s not perfect, but it is safe! During my quest I found a terrific (and free) download called iSpring Free, a handy PowerPoint to Flash converter. I have included information from the site below…

iSpring Free works within PowerPoint, transforming it into a fast and easy Flash authoring tool. It is compatible with any PowerPoint version 2000/XP/2003/2007 installed on a Windows machine. To create Flash files viewable on any device from your PowerPoint presentations, just install iSpring Free, open your PowerPoint presentation, click Quick Publish and get Flash slideshows from your PPT presentations in just a few seconds.”

iSpring Free converts PowerPoint into a single .SWF file with all external multimedia resources embedded making it extremely easy to share Flash presentation on a web-site or blog, send via email or burn on a CD. As a word of warning….iSpring Free also offers an option to publish your presentations right from PowerPoint to an application/site called SlideBoom, a free Web 2.0 online hosting site for presentations. I do not recommend this option even though you can get easy embedding code from the SlideBoom site. SlideBoom was one of the sites I tested for possible inclusion in this post…I do not recommend SlideBoom for content purposes. My computer also kicked out several virus warnings for malware when I tried to open some of the documents posted on the SlideBoom site.

Let me make myself clear….I highly recommend iSpring Free as a conversion tool, I just do not recommend the SlideBoom publishing option that is included with the program. I have included some screenshots from the program below, as well as a sample Flash PowerPoint I created.

This is the toolbar that appears in PowerPoint when you install the free iSpring Free program on your computer…

I have only worked with the publish icon; I plan to explore the other capabilities of the program later. Here is the screen that appears when you use the Publish option…

Here is the sample I created using a PowerPoint I created earlier….

Now, I realize that PowerPoint includes a webpage option, but I have found that for involved, lengthy PowerPoints it simply does not do a good job. If you want to post PowerPoints for review, for students who have been absent, or as classroom newsletters I highly recommend iSpring Free. It’s slick and easy to use from the creation and viewing standpoint. I also found that inserting a flash file in my blog was a fairly simple task. I hope my quest helps you as you post PowerPoints online for your students!